Bolivia during the global crisis 1998-2004: towards a ‘macroeconomics of microfinance

The macroeconomic role of microfinance appears to have varied enormously between country cases, as notably exposed by the recent wave of macro-economic crises. For example, in Indonesia in the late 1990s microfinance appears to have played a notably counter-cyclical role, whereas in Bolivia, the main focus of this paper, its role was in most cases to intensify rather than restrain the crisis. We find part of the explanation for this in the behaviour of government towards microfinance (much more conciliatory towards defaulting debtors in the Bolivian case) and in the structure of demand (unfavourable, in Bolivia, to the distribution and service sector which is the main market for microenterprise). However, closer examination of the Bolivian case suggests that institutional design also played an important role. In particular, those organisations which provided savings, training and quasi-insurance services bucked the trend of rising default rates and falling lending through the crisis and did particularly well, whereas the new breed of consumer-credit microfinance organisations did particularly badly and in several cases went out of business. This experience suggests,in particular, that it may be appropriate to call into question the fashionable´ minimalist´ (credit-only) model of microfinance, as certainly in Bolivia it was principally the credit-plus institutions which proved more financially disciplined and more resilient to crisis

Alien Registration- Mosley, William R. (Portland, Cumberland County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/21901/thumbnail.jp

The relationship between production level and reproductive efficiency in dairy cattle

Nine measures of production and four measures of reproductive efficiency were compared and analyzed on 453 cows over a five-year period from 1963 to 1968. The purpose was to ascertain the effect of production level on reproductive efficiency. Data were analyzed by correlation and regression analysis and analysis of variance. Correlation analysis revealed a small positive correlation between most production and reproductive traits. Regression analysis revealed that the influence of 120-day FCM on days to conception tended to be linear and was signi-ficant at all age levels with the exception of five-year-olds. The analysis of variance also confirmed that milk production exerts a significantly depressing effect on reproductive efficiency. The least significant differences between treatment groups state that reproductive efficiency in the top treatment group is significantly different from reproductive efficiency within the two bottom groups. Although R2 values indicate that milk production accounts for only a small portion of the variation in reproductive efficiency, it appears from this study that high levels of milk production do exert a significantly depressing effect on reproductive efficiency as measured by days to conception, days from first service to conception, and services per conception

Benefit-Finding Improves Well-Being among Women Who Have Experienced Gender Discrimination

Women experience gender discrimination in numerous important life domains, which can harm psychological well-being. Benefit-finding—identifying the positive implications of having overcome a negative experience—has been theorized as a coping strategy to improve well-being. We experimentally tested whether prompting women, recruited online, to consider the implications of their past experiences of discrimination for themselves in the present—and the benefit-finding that follows—can improve well-being. U.S women (n = 409) were asked to consider a past experience of sexism in three data collections (Studies 1a, 1b, 1c). In each collection, participants were randomly assigned to a benefit-finding condition or a control condition. Those participants in to the benefit-finding condition were asked to write about the implications or lessons of their experience for the present whereas those women randomly assigned to the control condition did not. A meta-analysis based on the three data collections revealed that participants in the benefit-finding condition reported greater well-being than those in the control, which was a moderately strong effect. In a third collection (Study 1c), we included an additional control condition in which participants wrote about known facts of gender discrimination. We also included measures of sexism perceptions and willingness to engage in collective action. Participants who reflected upon the implications of their past experiences of sexism reported the highest intentions to engage in collective action to confront future sexism (relative to both control conditions). For women coping with discrimination, this intervention can help alleviate the harmful consequences of discrimination and motivate support to fight gender inequality